Data storage products maker EMC is buying much of Cisco's stake in their joint venture VCE. The VCE joint venture, set up in 2009 as a one-stop shop for data centres, bundles Cisco's networking equipment and servers with EMC's storage gear and software from EMC's VMware subsidiary.

EMC is expected to merge VCE into its business and consolidate its sales into its quarterly results and an announcement will be made later today. EMC on Tuesday said it would make an announcement regarding a "new business development" Wednesday morning. Cisco will retain investment in the business, but at a reduced stake

EMC is also scheduled to report its third quarter results on Wednesday, said it has no plans to give up its 80 percent stake in VMware. Reports of EMC and Cisco encroaching on each other's turfs had sparked off rumours of the partnership coming to bits. EMC is also rumoured to be closing in on a deal to buy cloud start-up company Maginatics.

Data centre market leader EMC just released some boxes which eclipse anything that its rivals have out there. The new EMC VNX range is made up of the systems (VNX5200, VNX5400, VNX5600, VNX5800, VNX7600, VNX8000 and VNX-F). It breaks most of the speed and efficiency records set by its two year old range of products.

The secret sauce is that it has optimised the Intel multi-core chips and configured the flash drives in the box so that they behave like flash rather than super-fast HDD drives. The upshot of all of this is that the EMC VNX Series can deliver practically twice the speed and performance for a third of the price of the old boxes.

Companies hoping to build a data centre can actually buy a cheaper box and still get a faster speed. Enabled with MCx software, the new VNX Series is designed to address the high-performance, low-latency requirements of virtualized applications, which is the most common use case for midrange solutions. MCx software takes full advantage of the latest Intel-multi core processing technology to optimize flash by distributing all VNX data services across all cores (up to 32).

This is a new approach for midrange arrays—enabling the new VNX to deliver the performance of the previous generation at only one-third the price. With this sort of technology it is hard to see how other data services outfits can even enter the market.

A cunning plan by the big names in proprietary software to snap up Novell's patents has fallen through leaving the future of the patents in doubt.

Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and EMC had planned to create a consortium to acquire hundreds of Novell patents but now they have decided not to press ahead with it as it could get them into all sorts of anti-trust hotwater. CPTN Holdings was to jointly acquire 882 Novell patents for $442 million. The rest of Novell was to be sold to Attachmate for $2.2 billion, with that sale being conditioned upon the closing of the proposed sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings.

Now it seems that the deal has been voluntarily withdrawn, with no information available to explain why. Open source advocates, with both the American Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) filed complaints about the plans with the German Federal Cartel Office.

It is not clear what will happen to the patents now and there are rumours that an open source collective might attempt to buy them.